One of the designers who made it happen

Winner
- paganus

Another great job from Paganus

- jamesWI

How Chromed started their logo design journey

Company name

"March 32nd" or "March 32"

Overview

We're a small company composed of an eclectic mix of writers, software developers, game designers, and film makers striving to create narrative-focused, interactive games with a very cinematic, tv-and-film-like feel.

Depending on the audience, we pitch it as Interactive TV. A choose-your-own-adventure come to life. Or the classic King's Quest-style Graphical Adventure Game re-envision. But in all cases, we pitch it as something Amazing.

Tell us a bit about who you are and the people you reach

We're targeting several disparate audiences simultaneously.

There's the "gamer" market - an audience that actively consumes video games across a wide variety of platforms. Entertaining gameplay and production value are their primary concerns.

There's the casual game market - an audience that isn't nearly as voracious
as gamers. They enjoy experiences that are approachable, the mechanics are simple and intuitive, and the entire thing is easy to pickup and put down. We're hoping to give them just that, but the production value of *real* games.

And finally, there's the TV and film viewing market - an audience that doesn't see itself as ever playing a game. Heck, they may even actively avoid any experience labelled as a game. But we want to give them the joy of experiencing a production built for them, but with an interactive component - an interactive film.

Requirements

Basically - we want something great.

A perfect logo should scale all the way from displaying at the start of our game (full color and eye catching), down to black-and-white printed materal, and all the way down to a small-but-recognizable simple image, for branding purposes.

When envisioning the logo, imagine it on the movie poster for a dark psychological thriller. A modern, urban setting but with a creeping madness and corruption. Small dollips of dark fantasy and impossible things on top of a twisted reality. A mixture of Pan's Labyrinth and Dark City, for example (this is just a pair of relevent samples - please don't read too much into it).

If you can't see it on a movie poster, *your design won't work*. Think more "film" then "game".

We're currently leaning towards something with a more modern design. Professional. Strong. Urban and gritty. With nice subtle touches that are the hallmark of a professional design. Perahps with a *touch* of more organic elements to give it a small fantasy feel. We'd really like a design that relates to our productions. And a clever and iconic enough connection that if we just showed them a small image, they'd immediately tie it to our product (like Half-Life's
lambda, Portal's "o", Pan's Labyrinth's small circle maze, etc etc).

To provide context, to help inform the design:

- "March 32nd" is a gaming + film hybrid – a narrative heavy, interactive game with a very film-like feel.
- The look and setting is modern urban, mixed with a moderate dose of 30’s-40’s era film noir. The film "Dark City" is a good visual reference.
- Silhouettes are a *very* prominent design element in the production (see the sample screenshoot). An artful design that plays with them and silhuoette cutouts would probably work very, very well.
- The production toys with and confuses the notion of time and causality.

We've included our existing logos, along with a theoretical screenshot from our production.

The logos we have are serviceable, but we're picky - we want something better. Again, I want to emphasis (designers are taking entirely too much direction from the sample logos) - *we aren't satisified with the sample logos*. I don't recommend basing your design around them. But do realize, you need to exceed the bar set by them. While they aren't perfect, they're still artful, professional, and eye-catching. But I'm sure you can do better. :)

--

In an effort to provide some more direction, here's a critique of the sample logos we attached to the contest -

The sample logos aren’t quite what we’re looking for – they’ll do in a pinch, but we’re hoping to do better. Things they do well:

- The colorful versions are eye catching.
- They have a sense of decay mixed with a touch of elegance, though the base fonting projects a more rustic aesthetic then we’d like.
- The (ugly) limited-color versions are readily represented by vector images, allowing us resolution flexibility.

That said, they have a number of issues:

- They don’t shrink well – it’s difficult for us to create a smaller, simplified branding image that still has impact.
- They don’t really project a feeling of what our project actually is.
- They’re forgettable – there isn’t anything particularly clever about the design. Perhaps something with more imagery (rather than the text-focus of the current design) may be a better fit.